3D Chess (4 boards)

Chess — The Future Generation’ — Paul Glover © 1990

This game is based on (Chess — The Next Gen­er­a­tion), (this is the old page “Chess — The Next Gen­er­a­tion”) (also, anoth­er old page of detailed rules).

These are only the addi­tion­al rules:

  • White and Gold play against Black and Silver
  • White moves 1st, then Black fol­lowed by Gold and Sil­ver, in that order at ALL times
  • Chess pieces are set up as in reg­u­lar chess on ‘A’ lev­el and ‘D’ lev­el at ALL times
  • White and Black are set up on board lev­el ‘A’ with the White Rook on Aa1
  • Gold is set up on the bot­tom board on the right side of White (‘D’ lev­el) Rook on Dh1
  • Sil­ver is set up on the bot­tom board on the right side of Black (‘D’ level)
  • The queens are on their own col­or (ie. Black/Silver Queens are on a black square, White/Gold Queens are on a white square)

Chess - The Future GenerationThere is no check­mate but rather you must cap­ture the King! This allows you to move into check with the under­stand­ing that YOUR King could be cap­tured. Of course, Your Team Col­or hope­ful­ly can block the check! If a King is cap­tured, play con­tin­ues with­out that col­or in the sequence. That col­ors pieces remain on the board with no influ­ence and can be cap­tured as in reg­u­lar chess. For exam­ple if Blacks King was cap­tured, Black is out. In that case the oth­er team will have two moves to your one move. It would White, Gold, Sil­ver — White, Gold, Sil­ver…  in that order. Not a good sit­u­a­tion to be in.

These are the two addi­tion­al rules for this game:

  1. Move­ment to boards:In order for each colour to move to suc­ces­sive board lev­els, each play­er must first estab­lish four pieces on the board lev­el that is direct­ly above/below the ‘start­ing’ lev­el. WHITE for exam­ple, would have to have four of his own pieces on the ‘B’ lev­el before he can progress to ‘C’ and/or ‘D’ lev­els. Sim­i­lar­ly, BEIGE(or gold at the bot­tom) would have to have four of his own pieces on the ‘C’ lev­el before he can move to ‘B’ and/or ‘A’ lev­els. Once this step has been accom­plished, the four pieces are not required to remain on that lev­el, nor does this step need repeat­ing. So basi­cal­ly, once you have achieved 4 pieces, you announce to every­one, “I have my 4 pieces”.
  2. KNIGHT:when it reach­es the oth­er side of it’s board or the oppo­site side of the gen­er­al direc­tion of it’s pieces on any lev­el, it becomes a ‘Crowned Knight’ with a red check­er piece put under­neath it (or some­thing that clear­ly shows that it is dif­fer­ent). This enables it to also move like the shape of an ‘L’ right-side up or upside down. In oth­er words, it can also now move one square for­ward, (or back­wards, or the imme­di­ate left, or the imme­di­ate right) and down, or up, two squares. There­fore, if it was on lev­el ‘A’, it could now move to lev­el ‘C’ in addi­tion to it’s reg­u­lar moves. For exam­ple if the Crowned Knight was at square #Aa1, can now move to: Ac2, Ab3 (nor­mal chess move) Bc1, Ba1 (nor­mal uncrowned move as is men­tioned in ‘Chess — The Next Gen­er­a­tion’) Cb1, Ca2, these being the two new addi­tion­al places it could move to, once Crowned. This is now the only very pow­er­ful strate­gic piece that can move 2 lev­els in one move. If it was in the mid­dle of the board it can con­trol 16 squares. This PIECE POINT val­ue would now be worth 7 com­pared to 3 points before it was crowned.

It is very strong­ly rec­om­mend­ed to use a white stone or object to indi­cate who’s move it is. In fact the move is NOT com­plete until the white stone is passed to the next play­er, which says: ‘That is my move!’  This is done because every­one can and will lose tract of who’s turn it is to play! It hap­pens every time, some­ones says, “Who’s turn is it?”. This is because every­one is so into thought about their own move, they for­get to check who is about to move. The object could be a coin but it’s too small to be noticed.

The Game takes about 5 times longer to play or 3.5 to 4.5 hours when com­pared to ‘Chess — The Next Gen­er­a­tion’ or con­ven­tion­al 2D chess which takes only 30–45 mins.

I played one game where I played White and Gold and he played Black and Sil­ver. The game took 8 hours (I used my ‘Crowned Knight’ to get check­mate). That’s because I knew when play­ing White, what Gold was going to do. But when play­ing the game with 4 peo­ple (each hav­ing a col­or) and no talking/texting to your team play­er is aloud, you real­ly don’t know what your team play­er is going to do. Then mis­takes hap­pen and the game ends in 3–4 hours. Sequence of play is very key to winning.

How To win: This game is all about Sequence and Playing as a Team!

No mat­ter how good you are, the side that plays the best as a team, will win!


An Update (for playing as a Team):

That being said, (the rules for play­ing “Chess — The Future Gen­er­a­tion”): Because of the suc­cess of how the game, “Chess — The Next Gen­er­a­tion” is set­up and played, shows that there is anoth­er way to set­up the game (Chess — The Future Gen­er­a­tion). White is set­up in the usu­al way (Rook is on square Aa1) on Board Lev­el “A”. Black is set­up in the usu­al way, but on Board Lev­el “B” and across from White. Gold is set­up in the usu­al way, but on Board Lev­el “C”, on the same side as White. Sil­ver is set­up in the usu­al way, but on Board Lev­el “D”, on the same side as Black. White moves 1st, then Black fol­lowed by Gold and Sil­ver, in that order at ALL times.

White and Gold would still play as a team vs Black and Sil­ver. The game would be played using the rules for “Chess — The Next Gen­er­a­tion”. How­ev­er, There is still no check­mate but rather you must cap­ture the King! which allows you to move into check with the under­stand­ing that YOUR King could be cap­tured. Of course, Your Team Col­or hope­ful­ly can block the check! If a King is cap­tured, play con­tin­ues with­out that col­or in the sequence. There is one more thing con­cern­ing the KNIGHT: … when it reach­es the oth­er side of the board on any lev­el, it becomes a ‘Crowned Knight’. As is explained above, it can now move like the shape of an ‘L’ right-side up or upside down. It would be the only piece, that can move 2 lev­els in one move. Here’s Anoth­er Pho­to.
3D "Chess - The Future Generation


Something to Think-about …

When play­ing reg­u­lar chess (or 2D flat 1 board chess), you only have a cer­tain amount of good open­ing moves to make. Some moves are bad moves or los­ing moves. How­ev­er you must move the pawns to get things in motion (except the knights). There­fore, you are lim­it­ed to what you can play as a good bunch (1st five moves) of open­ing moves!

How­ev­er, when play­ing 3D Chess (or “Chess — The Future Gen­er­a­tion”), you have 16 pos­si­ble open­ing moves! There is also an incred­i­ble num­ber of open­ing com­bi­na­tions (1st five moves) that would nev­er have exist­ed in reg­u­lar 2D chess.

This is still chess! but it will give you a “brain-work-out” like you’ve nev­er had one before!

This is, … The Ulti­mate Chess Challenge!

You will be sitting on the edge of your seat in this Ultimate Chess Challenge!

If you have any com­ments, you could make them at my Flickr account.


Really 3D

BTW, there’s dif­fer­ent ideas as to what is 3D (does it look 3D or is it 3D = L x W x H). So here is a def­i­n­i­tion from some­one elsephys.org/news/…highrise mem­o­ry chip. There is an illus­tra­tion show­ing the four-lay­er pro­to­type high-rise chip built by Stan­ford engi­neers. And one more def­i­n­i­tion: pcper.com/news/Processors/Intel-…